The Neon God We Made

Nine ten.

Life is strange. If you don’t drink, it’s even stranger. Apparently someone stole a letter from my mailbox a few months ago and used my identity to try to get a refund from the IRS. I don’t know how long it will take to sort the whole thing out, but there’s only so much I can do each day. The days when people were honest and trustworthy seem to be over. I know I sound like an old fogy saying this. A couple of factors are involved in our decline: the failure of the education system and our dependence on machines. Nobody knows anything anymore off the top of their head, and people can’t think their way out of a paper bag. It’s as though we externalized our minds to cyberspace and then forgot how to use our heads. But in doing this, we’ve sacrificed our own souls, given ourselves over to an alien power and left our fates up to it. As if the machines could be more intelligent than humankind; but this will prove to be a fatal fallacy for us. It tempts me to go throw my iPad in the Willamette River. Short of this, there must be something we can do to correct the course we’re on. Crack a book, maybe, preferably something by D.H. Lawrence, or anything organic and healthy. 

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Hitting the Brakes

Ten thirty. I was disconsolate all day until, as I lay in bed, it occurred to me what had been missing from my mental life: it was music. I was able to put together the rudiments of Le Coq D’Or by Rimsky Korsakov, just two passages from the part about King Dodon in his palace. It’s been so long since I was able to listen to the music files on my computer. So I lay there racking my brains for strains of the suite. Next, I searched my mind for Stravinsky’s Fireworks with more success… I just played it off of YouTube, but it’s not the same on my iPhone as on my old clunky Dell… Anyway, my mood rose a bit with the music in my head. Technology is strange to me. The race for it to be faster and freer, especially in music, is rendering obsolete the mediums to which I had an emotional attachment. Someday humans won’t even need to think— so what will be left for our minds to do? We will be utterly replaced by our technology, while our brains soak in suds or fry on methamphetamine, totally useless. Is this a desirable future for humanity? Or should I say, the humanities? The Luddite in me wants to break all machines and restore people to their natural splendor. So that my brain is again adept at retrieving music and playing it at will. Because this is my life, not the livelihood of any machine. Does anybody out there feel the same?